


i just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way

by creamsodaplease



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, M/M, POV Remus Lupin, Post-First War with Voldemort, Referenced Harry Potter, Referenced James Potter - Freeform, Referenced Lily Evans Potter, Referenced Peter Pettigrew, Sirius Black in Azkaban, cassette tapes, implied depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:01:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27585130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creamsodaplease/pseuds/creamsodaplease
Summary: [Click]SIRIUS: This is an official record by Sirius Orion Black to one Remus John Lupin...Three months after the First Wizarding War ends, Remus listens to a cassette tape labelled for him in Sirius Black's handwriting - Sirius, who is now in a cell in Azkaban.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 8
Kudos: 70
Collections: Wolfstar Games 2020





	i just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way

**Author's Note:**

> (Title from a letter from Vita Sackville West to Virginia Woolf.)  
> Beta'd by the lovely [ladypseudonym](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladypseudonym/). I truly don't think I could have written this without her.  
> This was written for the Wolfstar Games 2020 - I'm so lucky I got the opportunity to participate! I was on Team Sound. The prompt is embedded in the chapter.  
> I loved writing this!! It's pretty short and truthfully I can see it continuing as the end is pretty open, but I like the way it is for now, too.  
> Thank u sm to the mods for being so amazing and putting on this fest!! <333

When he got the first tape, Remus had been sitting at the kitchen table in a dingy little flat filled with reminders of everything he convinced himself he’d forgotten. It was the day Sirius left for Azkaban officially. He didn’t have a trial—or if he did, Dumbledore made sure it was kept secret.

He thought that perhaps he should make himself a cup of tea, just to do something with his hands, but he couldn’t muster up the energy to do much of anything. Eventually, the golden evening sun came through the windows in a way that reminded him of—well, nevermind that. A tawny owl tapped on the window over the sink, and he continued to sit until the tapping got persistent enough he thought the window would certainly shatter.

He pushed out his chair and walked mutely over the linoleum floor. His joints were stiff and his back hurt from doing nothing all day, which he thought was rather rude. Shouldn’t doing nothing mean nothing hurts?

He cracked open the window over the sink, hinges squeaking. He didn’t recognize the owl, but he supposed it must have been from the Ministry—at least until he saw the little square parcel it carried. It looked familiar, he thought, as he pulled it from the owl’s talons. “Sorry,” he said to the owl. He didn’t have anything to feed it. In another situation he would have probably felt bad, but he couldn’t muster up anything to feel. It pecked at his fingers half-heartedly.

He turned the parcel over and dropped it as if he had been burned, sucking in air between his teeth. It clattered on the countertop, the sound loud in the quiet flat. There, on the brown paper packaging, read his name—Remus John Lupin—in Sirius Black’s curving script.

* * *

The parcel sat on the counter, discarded and half-forgotten. There were Order meetings to get to, Harry’s well-being to be fussed over, Dumbledore to be angry at (for sending Harry to his relatives, those abusive bastards, and for excluding Remus from anything related to Sirius. He was sent off to the Faroe Islands to track remaining dark wizards for three weeks, during which their flat was wiped clean of any traces of Sirius and aurors apprehended and arrested him). There were moons to be locked in a basement cellar, screaming and screaming until he couldn’t feel anything at all anymore, and mornings to tend to his wounds.

It sat until suddenly Remus realized that this was it—the war was over and it was time to move on. There was no need for a two-bedroom flat (and really, there hadn’t been one before), and Remus just needed a fresh start. At least, that was what he had told Molly and Arthur when they asked him what he was going to do with the flat at the very last Order meeting. She gave him a look with a little too much pity than Remus was strictly comfortable with, and Arthur just clapped him on the back as they left. Remus knew he was just running away, no matter how little he wanted to admit it to himself.

And so on the evening of January 31st, three months after the end of the First Wizarding War, Remus sat in front of the offending parcel yet again at his kitchen table in a (smaller, dingier) flat. He thought about the boxes he needed to unpack and then tried to remind himself there was no use running, not anymore.

He forwent the detection spells he knew he should have done and opened the parcel, taking care not to rip the brown paper (he told himself it was because he didn’t want to make a mess and ignored the fact that what he held was the last piece of Sirius that he could get his hands on). Out fell a cassette tape. Remus, with shaking hands, thought that he had a walkman in a box somewhere.

He did, as it turns out, have a walkman. He carried it over to the table and sat down again. 

So. He was really doing this. 

He tried not to think too hard, but he was Remus, and overthinking was rather a specialty of his. He put the cassette tape in the player and fit his headphones over his ears before wondering, just for a moment, if this was a terrible idea. He had gotten a Mind Healer during the move (the Order paid for it. Remus didn’t think he would be able to afford it, let alone care enough to book appointments, if they didn’t.) and she had told him it was no use running from things but that he “ought to think about the life he had to live, rather than dwelling on the pain in his past.” Well, Mind Healer be damned, he was going to listen to whatever the buggering fuck was on the tape.

He swallowed tightly before pressing play and listening to whatever was so important that Sirius felt the need to send it to him from…wherever he had sent it from. Surely he couldn’t have sent it from Azkaban, could he?

Sirius’s voice filled his ears before he could prepare himself.

_SIRIUS BLACK: [click] Hey, Remus! Or—I should probably start this off more officially. [Clears throat] This is an official record of Sirius Orion Black to be sent to one Remus John Lupin in the event of his death or extraneous circumstances from which he will not be able to return._

_Unfortunately, dear, this means if you’re listening to this I’m probably dead, in which case: I hope you cremated me—it would piss off my mother, and besides, I would rather be ashes than in a fucking stupidly gaudy box in a hole in the ground in any case. But, well, at this point it hardly matters anyway. If I’m not dead, then I’m in Azkaban, and what a twist that would be, right? [Laughs]_

_[Sniffs] I know you don’t like this, but it’s war time, and I feel like I should leave behind some mark of myself, even if it’s just for you. You’re really all that’s important anyway, you and James and Lily and Harry and Peter._

_Yes, if you’re wondering, it’s August 2_ _nd_ _as I record this. You were just in Wales on Order business—you won’t say exactly what it is, but I know it’s more organizing the werewolves—and you’re coming back later today. I wish you didn’t have to do that, love. I wish Dumbledore would just sod off sometimes._

_I daydream about you and me fucking off to the Continent or America and leaving this all behind. I know there’s a war to fight, darling, but I just like to imagine it. The two of us anywhere but here._

_[Laughs] This is probably ridiculously sappy. I’m sorry, dear. I did try. You’re just too lovely. [Laughs]Anyway. I suppose I should get to business._

_This counts as my last will and testament in the event of my passing, and so I’ll tell you what I’m leaving to whom:_

_To Remus John Lupin, and, in the event of his death, Harry James Potter, I leave three-quarters of the contents of my Gringotts vault, all my current belongings, my motorcycle, and the contents of the library at the Most Noble House of Black, provided no remaining family members are alive to claim it._

_To James Fleamont Potter and Lily Evans Potter, and, in the event of their death, Harry James Potter, I leave Number 12 Grimmauld Place in its entirety, including the house-elf Kreacher and excluding the contents of the library, which goes to Remus John Lupin as previously stated._

_To any surviving direct blood relatives to the Black line, I leave exactly one Knut each._

_Well, now that business is done away with! And yes, I did leave you Elvendork, but no, you don’t have to ride it. It’s alright, I’ll forgive you. [Laughs] Anyway, this tape was just for the Ministry’s paperwork but I thought that maybe you would want to hear from me again, so I worked it out where another tape will be sent after this—and when I say I worked it out, I mean Dumbledore did. For as much as I have contempt for him, I can’t help but admire him sometimes. Anyway. That means you’ll hear from me the day after you listen to this—the magic’s set up for that, so if you let this rot in an attic somewhere I’ll be very sad. [Laughs] Alright. I’ve got to go now, because you’re on your way home soon and you told me to clean the bathroom before I left for watch, but you’ll hear from me tomorrow. Love you, darling._

_[click]_

Remus sat and stared, and then sat and stared some more just for the hell of it. Well. Buggering fuck, then.

* * *

The next day Remus tried to go about his normal life but he couldn’t stop thinking about the cassette recording. Sirius wasn’t dead—not yet, at least—but if he had gone to the Ministry to set this up for Remus, what had he been expecting would happen?

The war had gotten darker and darker, right up until the end. Remus, Sirius, Peter, and James had all lived together at first, at least until James and Lily had gotten married. They had eventually been moved to a safe house and Peter had gotten tired of third wheeling in his own flat. Even then, everything seemed uncertain. Sirius was gone for watches and raids and Remus was gone trying to recruit werewolves so often that it was almost as if no one lived in their flat at all.

On those brief days and nights they saw each other Remus decided he had to ignore the rest of the world. There would be no war in the precious nights they spent curled around each other like quotation marks, no war in the rare days they lived domestically, cooking and reading and dancing in the living room to the records they had bought when they were young and naïve.

It was on the nights when the bed was cold and empty that Remus, however ashamed he was to admit it, let the war in. He welcomed the terror of knowing everyone he loved could die at any moment into his bed, and with it came distrust. He knew he wasn’t making any sense, but then—was he? Was Sirius _really_ out on a raid, or was he in someone else’s bed, trying to pretend this nothingness, this great expanse of suffering doesn’t exist?

Remus felt the hot burn of shame in his stomach when he thought of those months. What a fool he had been to feel so anxious and betrayed for no reason at all.

He thought about the same feeling he’d been having in these months after the war. Lily and James had already been at the safe house for nearly a year when the tape was recorded—how could he betray them? Did he? Was Sirius still lying, even into imprisonment and possible death? Or perhaps he thought it wasn’t important enough to include. Then again, thought Remus, there was another tape coming today.

And, as if on cue, a tapping came from the window above the sink. The hinges still squealed as Remus opened it, and he thought that maybe he would try to fix it sometime. He pet the owl, a black one this time, as he removed the parcel from its leg. It might as well be a copy of the one from yesterday, brown-paper packaging and all. He stuffed the tape in the walkman, hands shaking—except this time it’s from a combination of dread and hope rather than uncertainty and anxiety.

He swallowed, throat dry, and pressed play.

_[Click]_

_SIRIUS: This is an official record by Sirius Orion Black to one Remus John Lupin to be sent in the event of his death or other extraneous circumstances from which he will not be able to return. Today is August 2_ _nd_ _. I’m sure you can hear the crickets—I’m in the alleyway outside our apartment recording. I don’t want to wake you, and you haven’t been sleeping well recently. I think it’s the stress of the war—I mean, it’s affecting me too._

_Anyway. You probably don’t want to listen to me talk about the war. It’s hard enough as it is to live in it, let alone through it._

_I begged Dumbledore to let me make this record. Traditionally just one is sent as a last will and testament, but I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving you without something else from me. The cassette tape is rather unorthodox as well—but then, when am I ever orthodox?_

_[Cars pass by]_

_SIRIUS: I—um, I thought about what my last words to you should be, and I wrote something down. So. Just a second._

_[Paper crinkling]_

_SIRIUS: [clears throat] Moony—_

_My key to Gringotts is under the—_

_[Silence for several moments]_

_SIRIUS [laughing]: Just kidding. This will be sort of soppy, so bear with me._

_I intend that by the time you’re listening to this we’ll have been married for 64 years and we are hopelessly in love. I hope that doesn’t come as a surprise to you. If what I intend comes to pass, none of what I’m going to say will matter. Just ignore that. I have loved you for all of my mortal life, I loved you before my existence, and I will love you until the remains of my flesh have decayed into the earth and trees grow where I lay. I will love you until there is no earth to hold me. You are—you’re the moon to my star, so to speak. [Sniffling] I—sorry, Moony._

_I hope we all stay together, you and me and James and Lily and Harry and Peter. I know we probably won’t, people grow apart with old age and all, but—I still hope._

_I, uh—I also wrote a list of things I haven’t told you before or I thought you should know. So, here goes._

_[Cars pass by]_

_I actually didn’t think you were a werewolf when James and Pete and I asked you about it. They were convinced, but I thought there was no way, and anyway, you probably had some muggle disease that everyone would laugh at if they knew. Biggest shock of my life when I found out it was true._

_We actually started working on Animagus transformations in the middle of third year, not fifth year like we said. I know you would’ve killed us._

_I never told you ‘n James ‘n Pete, but Walburga did, um—did actually hurt us. Me and Reg. Like, physically. You guys probably figured it out, but it didn’t stop me from trying to hide the evidence. The worst was, um, the day before I ran away. Orion said something about—about how werewolves were Dark creatures who were all ped—um, pedophiles, and queers, and faggots. And then I threw something at him. Lots of somethings. And then Walburga, um—she, uh, she. She hurt me. Um. With one of the— [quietly] Unforgivables. The cruciatus curse._

Remus felt sick to his stomach, but he had to keep listening.

_Sorry. That was sort of terrible, wasn’t it?_

_[Cars pass by]_

_SIRIUS: Speaking of Regulus—I didn’t cut off contact with him when I left home. You all would have yelled at me, and for good reason, but he’s my brother. He knew just how bad it was at home. He’s marked as missing in action, but I just know he’s dead. There’s no possible way he could’ve been a deserter and not been killed. I don’t like to think about him much because he was a Death Eater, but he wasn’t all bad, you know? There was still some good left in him._

_Um. Okay. I guess I haven’t kept that much from you; there’s only one thing left. That’s a good thing, right?_

_Anyway. I’m not actually the Secret-Keeper for James and Lily. I figure by the time you’re hearing this the war’s over, but if not—I don’t know. Don’t tell anyone?_

_It’s Peter. We switched at the last minute, not even Dumbledore knows. We figured—well, I come from one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, right? And I’m James’s best mate. If I got captured by the Death Eaters they would think I was the Secret-Keeper and they would try to get it out of me. But Peter—Peter, they wouldn’t suspect. So we switched._

Remus felt something cold settle in his stomach.

_That’s it. I guess—I don’t have much else to say?_

_[Cars pass by]_

_I love you, Remus. Don’t forget it after I’m gone._

_[Click]_

Remus stood rather quietly for a man who had just found out what he had. “I think,” he said to his empty flat, “I ought to pay Dumbledore a visit.”

He made sure to slip the two cassette tapes and the walkman into his pocket before taking his cloak from the stand by the fireplace, fastening it tightly, and taking a handful of floo powder. “Headmaster’s office; Hogwarts!” He said loudly and clearly before vanishing into a flash of green fire. 

**Author's Note:**

> **Mod Note**
> 
> Please vote on this work! [VOTING FORM](https://forms.gle/xsS36Vf7rTxPHxbk7)


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